The Birth of the Fox
by Birsin
Summary: What happened in Fox's past? What horrors and traumas has he endured to become known as the Nine Tails Fox? Well, as many other stories start, It all begins with one incident.
1. Chapter 1

Dead. I opened the door to my house, I had just bought a toy from a store just down the street. A whole three dollars and fifty cents of allowance for a plush snow fox. I was so proud of myself, because I had cleaned my room and washed the dishes for weeks until I could buy it myself. But as soon as I stepped into the house, I smelled something awfully close to blood mixed with my parents' scent. I rushed to the kitchen and found them, dead. Their bodies ripped open and limbs scattered around the room. The once pristine white walls were now coated with red blood, and my parents' faces were frozen in horrid expressions. I dropped my fox in a pool of the blood and went to their corpses, trying to wake them up, trying to see their smiling faces. I fed them meat to see if they would heal, but it was much too late for them to recuperate from the massacre that had claimed them here. I ran to my room and grabbed my blanket to help keep them both warm. I thought that if I stayed with them, they would get better soon, if I kept them warm, they wouldn't become cold and lifeless. I grabbed my fox from the bloody ground and covered all of us in the blanket as best as I could. Days passed, and all I could do was cry until I fell asleep again. There was nothing left of them now except for my memories. On the last day, I was so hungry. All of the meat that we kept, I had tried to use to help my parents, and was now wasted. I couldn't help but eat. I grabbed my father's arm and started to bite. Suddenly, the door to my house was knocked on and I quickly retreated to under the blanket.

"I know you're there little one." said a deep, calming voice, "There's no need to be afraid. I'm here to help." The voice sounded friendly, but I knew better than to trust friendly voices, as not all of them are as friendly as they seem.

"I'm not coming out until you tell me who you are." I yell at the voice. "My parents told me not to trust someone I don't know." I curled up into a ball and readied my kagune.

"Your parents were smart to teach you that, but now look what happened to them." I started to hear footsteps splashing in the pool of blood that had replaced the floor. "You can call me the director. I am part of an organization that specializes in taking care of orphaned ghouls such as yourself. We raise them to be spies and heroes that make sure nasty ghouls don't hurt people." The footsteps stopped.

"So why are you here?" I asked the voice. "Are you here to take me to this place?"

"Yes I am. In fact, I can help you find who did this." A hand grabbed the blanket and lifted it off of me. I looked to see a large man with so much power that the air felt heavy with his presence. "If you come with me, that is." I couldn't move, I was so intimidated. Was this man human, or ghoul, or something else entirely. "What do you say. Are you willing to come with me?" All I could do was nod. He held out his hand and I took it, clutching my bloodstained fox close to myself.

"Mister director, how did they find us? I mean, the people that killed my parents." I looked up at him as we walked out of the front door.

"I honestly do not know. By the way, what's your name?" He looked down at me, his face so kind, but the power was still there.

"Cerus. I'm nine years old." we walked to a helicopter and I got in. "How old are you sir?"

"Cerus, I don't even know that anymore." He replied getting in the seat next to me and telling the pilot to take off. We flew for what felt like ages until we reached our destination.

We landed on a helipad on top of what looked like a hospital. We both got out of the helicopter and walked through the door being held open for us by a tall man in a white lab coat. He smiled as we passed the threshold, but the Director rushed me along before I could see his face well enough. We went down several flights of stairs before entering a brightly lit, white hallway.

"This whole place is called the compound." The director said as he led me down the hall. "There are about one hundred sixty three other ghouls living here like you. You'll be paired with another child about your age. She's kind of shy at first, but she can handle her own if she has to, remember that." I nodded and followed him into a room with two beds. One was very clean and orderly, while the other looked like it has been slept in for a while.

"Where is she Mister Director?" I asked him, looking around the room for this mysterious girl.

"She's hiding. But don't worry, she'll come out from where she is eventually." The Director started to close the door as he left.

"Wait. I need to wash my fox." I grabbed the door and held it open.

"Here, I'll take care of him." He held out his large hand and I placed my bloody fox toy in his palm. "I almost forgot. You may want to clean up. The bathroom is just down the hallway. There's clothes in the drawers under your bed, and food will be served tonight at the end if the hallway." He left the room, shutting the door behind him. I still had so many questions, the realization had just washed over me. I'm away from my house, I went with a stranger to a strange place that I don't know the location of. I fell to the ground and curled up into a ball, shaking. I don't know how long I was in that state, but finally, I heard someone talking.

"Hey!" her voice said. "What's wrong with you? Why are you shaking like that? Are you dying?" she kicked me with her foot and I looked up. She had short, dark brown hair, and her green kagune was rolled up behind her, like some sort of reptilian tail.

"No." I stuttered in response. "I'm still alive."

"Then why are you covered in blood?" She asked me sincerely.

"It's not mine. It's my parents'." I started to tear up. "Someone killed my parents."

"It wasn't you was it?" She leaned closer to me.

"No. Why would I kill them? They're my parents!" I started to get angry at her, and my kagune released. Nine white tails emerged from my tailbone, each with a different series of lightning-like red veins running across the surface.

"Those look cool. They remind me of one of our lessons." She circled me, her tail now unraveled and stiff behind her. "The teachers taught us that there were these great spirits in Japan and one of them had nine tails. They ate people and tried to kill the emperor, but a man killed it and turned it into a stone."

"What was it called, it sounds like a ghoul." I was surprised by her knowledge, despite her being so young.

"It was a nine tailed fox. Her name was something like Tamamo no me." She stood still, contemplating the name.

"But I'm not a girl. I'm a boy." I was a bit confused at her words. Did she think I was a girl?

"It doesn't matter. Your kagune just reminds me of the story." She walked to the door and opened it with her green tail. "Come on, I'll show you where the shower is so you can get that blood off of you. Bring some clothes with you so you can change." She walked out and I opened the drawers under my bed. All of the clothes were plain white t-shirts and blue jeans. I grabbed a change of clothes and hurried down the hall after the girl. She stopped just a few doors away from our room. The door had a blue circle with a stick man and stick woman on it. She turned the handle with her tail and entered the room with me close behind.

We sat with each other, helping to get one another clean. She scrubbed all of the blood off of me as I cried, and I did my best to scrub her arms and back.

"The director said you were shy, but you're not trying to run away or anything." I said while I scrubbed her back with a sponge.

"You're not scary. You're hurt and broken, like me. I saw you on the floor and I felt like I did the same thing before." She seemed sleepy as she lied on the warm tile floor. "I just feel like we're the same, that's why I'm not running away." She stayed like that for a while, allowing me to scrub her back and arms. Once I was done, she sat up, turned off the water, and grabbed us both towels. I dried myself with it and got dressed in the clothes that were under my bed. They seemed heavier than normal, like they weren't regular clothes. We both walked out the doors and my stomach started to growl.

"I'm feeling hungry. Can we eat?" I asked her.

"Okay, the food place is down here." She walked further away from our room to a pair of doors. I followed her in and saw groups of kids my age at different tables. They were talking, laughing, and smiling as if this was their everyday experience. The girl led me to a table away from everyone else, where it was more quiet and bearable. A man with bright red hair walked over to our table and asked us if we were hungry.

"Yes sir." I said politely.

"You don't have to call me Sir. Call me Dragon." He smiled at me, his green eyes reflecting the lights of the room. "You must be the new one they were telling me about. What's your name?"

"My name is Cerus. I'm almost ten." I said nervously.

"Well you're older than Beelee here." He ruffled the girl's hair a little bit. "She's pretty new herself. Aren't you Teelee."

"Stop it. You still creep me out Dragon." She pushed his hand away. "Just bring us food so we can eat."

"Sure thing kiddo." He walked away and went through a door, returning with two small slabs of meat wrapped in paper. "Here you are, just pull back the paper and take a bite. No need to make a mess after taking a shower right?" I unraveled the meat from the top and took a bite. The meat was juicy and sweet, making my mouth flood with flavour. Each bite I took chipped away from the pit in my stomach that had developed within the days since I had found my parents dead. After I finished my meal, I lied my head on the table and fell asleep without crying for the first time in days.


	2. Chapter 2

Nonexistent, that was my childhood. As soon as I was taken in by this organization, it was a repeat, every day. Wake up, go to class, learn, "play". The only difference in our schedule was when we ate. It wasn't that often, since we could eat very little and not be hungry for a while, but it was the only time I had that I could talk freely with Beelee and Dragon. One day though, Dragon wasn't there. Instead, there was a scientist with a creepy smile. He seemed familiar to me, but I couldn't place where I had seen him. He watched over the other kids and looked at us as we walked in. We sat at our usual table, but there was already a serving of meat there for us. Both of us sat, puzzled, before eating. As I bit into it, the juices ran down the brown paper onto my hands and gushed into my mouth. This one tasted succulent and savory, a perfect flood of delicious flavour.

"This is the best meat I've had Beelee." I said, and I looked up to see if she was happy with the taste as well. I was surprised to see tears running down her eyes as she spat out the meat onto the plate. The scientist walked over to where we were and looked at her with a strange mixture of curiosity and pleasure.

"What could be the matter young one?" He asked her, his voice scraped the air like nails on a chalkboard.

"I don't want to eat it. I know who it is." She put down the meat on the plate and pushed it away from her.

"Are you sure about that?" He said, kneeling down beside her. "It's the only thing you'll get for a while. Why not at least eat half of it?"

"I don't want to eat him. I can't eat him." She started to get up, but the scientist pushed her back into her seat.

"It's either this friend or that one." he pointed at me as he finished his sentence. I stopped myself from taking a bite and put down the slab of meat in my hands. The scientist looked at me and said, "What? Are you not going to eat any either?" He looked furious, as if we had ruined a grand scheme of his. "Both of you will eat these whole, unless you want to end up eating eachother.

"I can manage sir." I said to him, "I'm pretty full already." I looked at the half-eaten slab on my plate, a mixture of hunger and disgust running through my stomach. He stared at me angrily for several minutes before leaving us both.

"Fine, eat each other for all I care, cry when you realize that you've killed your only friend in the process of satisfying your hunger." He was screaming at the top of his lungs, piercing the air with his anger.

"What was that about Beelee?" I asked her. She sat there crying for a few minutes before answering.

"I bit Dragon once, because he made me angry. I made him bleed I bit him so hard." I nodded at her, not understanding what she was saying. "This tastes just like him. I couldn't eat it." With that, I realized why the scientist was pointing at me when he said to chose which friend to eat. "I won't eat my friends, not ever!" she shoved the plate off the table and ran down the hall to our room. I couldn't help but sit and stare at the meat in front of me. If that was Dragon's, I just ate part of him. He could be dead for all I know. I got up and rushed to the bathroom, washing out my mouth at the sink. As the savory blood and leftover bits of meat washed away from in between my teeth, I forced myself not to cry, to stay optimistic. Dragon couldn't be dead. He was too strong for death, too important. He cannot die.

After spending the day in the bathroom, I headed to the room I shared and passed out on my bed, not bothering myself to hide under the covers. Soon after, I was awoken by Teelee, her tail wrapped around my stomach, slowly preventing me from breathing.

"Teelee stop!" I choked, reaching out to slap her face but connecting only with air. "Don't make me hurt you Teelee." I could barely breath now, her face came close to mine, a look of unfathomable hunger came from the red in her otherwise black eyes. I released my tails and lashed out with them, taking care not to cut her or pierce her skin. She fell on the ground and started crying. I got down from my bed and touched her shoulder to see if she was alright.

"Get away from me!" She yelled, lashing out with her tail. "Don't get near me, I might hurt you!" I blocked with my tails and hugged her.

"Are you hungry Teelee?" I asked her, holding out my hand in front of her. "You can eat a finger or two, I won't mind." She hesitated with her mouth open, drool spilling from her lips making a small pool on the floor.

"I can't I don't want to eat my friends." She struggled, trying to get out of my arms.

"If you won't eat my finger, I'll put my hand in your mouth instead. It's only a finger Teelee, I can grow it back." I put my hand closer to her mouth, wrapping her in my tails so she couldn't struggle.

"No. No, I won't eat you. I'm not hungry, stop!" She screamed and struggled. I finally ripped off a couple of fingers and stuffed them into her mouth, putting my hand over her lips so she couldn't spit them out. She thrashed in my grip, tears running down her cheeks and blood dripping from my hands. After a while, she calmed down and started chewing. She whimpered and cried while she ate my fingers, and all I did was sit and hold her. She finally swallowed and I retracted my tails back into my body.

"Don't worry Teelee, I'm not going to let you eat any more of me." She passed out in my arms, the tears slowly drying on her face. I picked her up and placed her on her bed, trying my best not to cover her in my blood. I walked out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. As soon as I entered, my hand started to hurt, and I couldn't help but scream in pain. I fell to my knees, clutching my bleeding hand, until a group of suits entered, followed by the crazy professor that had threatened Teelee earlier.

"Oh my, it looks as if we have to take care of you young ghoul." He walked up to me and took out a needle. "Don't worry, we'll take good care of you." He took my head in hand and lifted my eyelid, embedding the needle into the soft tissue within. The pain echoed through my skull as I flailed around, trying to escape this man's grasp, but it was no use. My strength was gone, and I could not bring out my tails. Something was wrong with the solution in the needle, something that made me weak. The man injected another needle into my eye and I soon fell asleep.

I awoke strapped to a table, with nothing on but my underwear. I struggled against the restraints, but to no avail. The man stepped out of a shadow in the corner of the room and chuckled.

"It's no use my boy, you are under Rc suppressant, everything that makes you inhuman is all but gone for now." He walked over to a table next to me and started picking up one knife after the other. "Which means that I can cut you open and look inside of you, but as long as I feed you, you won't die." He chuckled again, taking pleasure in the position of power he had over me.

"Why am I here?" I asked him, still struggling against the binds. "You can't just take me."

"Oh, that's where you're wrong. You see, this was the perfect opportunity to steal one of you away and study you on my terms. The facility has so many rules against just cutting you open and seeing what makes you tick. I want to see if there's anything different in this body of yours that we can use. And since your friend 'ate' you. No one will come looking for you. They'll think that she is at fault, and have her killed on the spot." He put a long sharp knife to the middle of my chest. "Now, please don't squirm. It's not that I dislike it, but it would make a real mess of these incisions if you do." He pressed down on the knife, immediately splitting my skin, causing blood to slowly drip down my chest. I screamed and struggled, the pain taking over my train of thought. All I could think of was to get out. Just get out of here and I will be fine, but there was no escape. There was no way to get out.

He dragged the blade down my abdomen, making a clean cut through my sternum and down my stomach. Blood spewed onto the floor, and I could not scream anymore. My chest was cut open, allowing me only to breath slightly.

"See, wasn't that easy? I heard of a torturer in Japan who's specialty was ghouls. He would have his victims count down from one thousand by sevens. I think that would be quite fun, don't you? Why don't you start now." He separated my rib cage just enough to look inside, causing tears to spill from my eyes even more than they already were.

"One thousand." He said, taking a lamp and positioning it over my chest cavity.

"Nine hundred ninety three." He went on, reaching into my chest, studying my organs.

"Nine hundred eighty six." He continued, taking notes on what he was observing.

"Nine hundred fifty eight." My vision started to blur, and the numbers started to pass faster. The next thing I knew, I was awake and my chest had healed shut. I could breath correctly again, but I was still strapped to the chair.

"You almost died. I forgot that ghouls needed to breathe as much as humans did." The scientist walked into my vision again. "I was afraid I would have to kidnap another of your kind. You were such a precious instance, as it so happens. The chances of replicating a situation so perfect would be difficult indeed." He grabbed the same knife and inserted it just below my diaphragm, making a squelching sound as it passed through my now soft skin. "Now, to continue with yesterday, but this time I'll make sure you stay conscious." He slid the blade down my stomach and I cried out in pain. He took his time, relishing the torture I was going through, cutting into my stomach so he could fold back the flesh that would usually protect me from this treatment.

"Let's start over with counting shall we." He reached into my intestines, pulling them out slowly to examine them. "One thousand." I almost vomited as he let my entrails lay out across an operation table next to me. "Nine hundred ninety three." He pushed my stomach upwards, causing me to throw up, bile dripping down the sides of my mouth. "How distasteful child." He said, looking at me with the rest of my intestines in his hands. I turned my head and spit out what bile was left in my mouth. "Nine hundred seventy two." He continued counting, becoming slightly more aggressive with each number. "It seems I have reached your predatory organ, or kagune." He lowered his head into the cavity that used to hold my intestines. "There seem to be more veins around it than any other organ, as if it were a tumor receiving food from your blood." He wrapped his hand around it as best as he could and squeezed. The pain that I felt could not be described. It was as if he was pinching every nerve in my body, making me numb but still able to feel pain.

"This is quite interesting indeed." His face was suddenly in front of mine. "Could it be that this is what makes a ghoul a ghoul? What if I were to extract this organ and prevent it from growing back?" He yanked on the sack of Rc cells attached to the base of my spine. The wave if excruciating pain filled my body again. I could not see or hear anything. The only sensation my body could give me was pain.

I suddenly found myself in an abyss. I was away from the pain, away from the evil doctor. I was at peace. I called out into the expanse of darkness, asking to talk to anyone, to see if I was dead. After a while, there was a response. A chilling voice, not unlike my own, but it housed a tone of insanity and cryptic pleasure.

"Do you really wish you were dead?" The voice echoed through the darkness. "Do you really wish it was all over?"

"Yes. Yes I do. I can't stand it anymore. The pain is too much!" I yelled out to the voice.

"But we are so young. Me, younger still. I do not want to die so early."

"I don't care. I can't take this anymore. I'm only nine, how am I supposed to deal with this."

"No, you are actually ten. You've been in the facility for a year, and you don't even know that."

"Nonsense. That can't be true." I started to get frustrated, I knew my own age, didn't I?

"You've been part of this system for little over a year. You were captured on your birthday, and you forgot about your parents' deaths. I have been keeping track of time, unlike you, who shut me out." I fell to the ground and wept. "It's okay though, I forgive you, since you were going through something so traumatic. But you really must pay more attention, unless you want me to get angry." Cold hands rested on either side of my face. I jumped away and looked at the creature they belonged to. He looked like me, but with pale white skin and scars all over his body. His fingers ended in sharp points like claws, and he smiled with jagged teeth. His eyes seemed to permanently be black and red, with red streaks running down his cheeks, and his hair was like a white rat's nest, as if he had never lived anywhere but the wilds.

"Who are you?" I asked him standing up in front of him. He smiled wider, showing off his fangs. There was a sound like liquid exiting his body as nine kagune grew out from behind him, exactly like mine.

"Just call me your personal ghoul." He said with glee as he rushed forward and enveloped me in darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

I stared at the blank concrete ceiling, waiting for the inevitable. It has been almost a year since my capture, according to my other self. Day in and day out of nothing but torture. He could not take out my kagune sack, for fear of killing me, but discovered something quite interesting.

"You don't have an appendix." I remember him saying. "Either you had it removed, but I cannot see how it would have been removed without you regrowing it, or you've never had one in the first place." This was after he tried to rip out my kagune. The information was unsettling to me, for some reason. Maybe ghouls weren't humans at all, and we just came into existence one day without warning. Maybe we were not of this world, and part of some ancient group of aliens that happened to pass by.

He came in a few months after almost tearing out my kagune with a huge smile on his face. I took the torture as I had been, with screams of agony and tears of pain. At one point, he stopped and let me lay there, gasping for breath.

"I'm sure you're wondering why I'm so happy today." He began, laughing maniacally. "I've captured more subjects to test. One of them being your friend. What was her name again? Teelee." My mind cleared and I was able to thrash about, despite the fact that my skin was peeled away from my legs and arms. "Yes. Struggle at the fact that your friend is helplessly under my control now. And not only her, but many other ghouls of varying ages are now being thoughtfully dissected by me. They're being changed, contorted, and experimented on to see what makes each one so unique. With your friend Teelee, I am discovering how to manipulate the colour of a kagune. Perhaps we will have a ghoul under our charge that will be able to camouflage itself, like a chameleon."

"The Director will find out what you're doing to us. He'll stop you." I screamed at him.

"Oh, but the reason why I can gather more ghouls to experiment on is because the Director told me I could. I showed him the results of my research on you and he saw it as profitable information." I couldn't believe what he was saying. The Director seemed to care when he picked me up, he seemed to care about weather I was hurt or if I would be safe. Why would he neglect us now, all of us?

My inner evil, which by then I took to calling Hoji, spoke through my mouth to the old man, "We will definitely kill you old man. We will kill you and eat you whole, and then, we will spit out the bones into the sewers and let them rot with the shit that has congealed in your filthy soul."

"Big words coming from a child." He said, giving me another dose of Rc cell repressant. "Do you want to hear what I think about, concerning the origin of ghouls?"

"Sure, why not." Hoji and I said, boredom laced within my voice.

"It is my educated opinion that ghouls are actually humans developed through the age old law of evolution. You see, there are many religions and cultures that used to require a human sacrifice to a more powerful being. Sometimes these cultures would consume humans. Now, you might say, 'what does that have to do with anything?'. Do you know what the appendix was once used for? It is thought that it was used for part of the digestion process. Now, I think that these groups of canibalistic people developed their appendix into what we now know as the predatory organ, kagune. Of course, the appendix is quite small within humans, but strange things can happen to any being, given a few thousand years." He sliced my muscles from my tendons, allowing them to hang from my bones. Pain was no longer a fear of mine, it was a reminder that I was still here, that he hadn't killed me yet.

During the times that I was passed out, I would train with Hoji. We would fight until I woke, and then I would endure the pain until I was returned to Hoji again. Sometimes Hoji and I would talk. Wondering what the others were going through and coming up with Ideas of how to get out. Years started to pass, and the pain started to become less relevant. I was able to hold out longer before passing out. Hoji and I started to become more evenly matched.

On my sixteenth birthday, the doctor walked in, followed by the Director. They were talking to each other, seemingly arguing.

"We need you to put it in him now! We don't have time to wait Mister Bellaire." The director's booming voice echoed through the room.

"I need more time. I can't just take a foreign organ and infuse it into his body." The doctor seemed scared of the Director. "It would ruin him internally!"

"Not if the organ belonged to his mother! Doctor, I implore you to see that we are in dire need." I did not understand what the director was saying. My mother? She couldn't be alive.

"Fine, I'll do it now. But don't expect him to immediately be able to fight him. He needs to get used to it of course." he pressed a button and the table I was on flipped over.

"We will have him go through training as soon as possible for him to use the new kagune." I heard the director open a case and put something on the table next to mine.

"There are two?! Director, even with the fact that they were his mother's, if we give him three of these organs, he would have to eat exclusively ghouls to maintain the cells necessary to use all three!"

"And we will provide him with such, so long as he can clean up this mess, we should do whatever we can!" The director held him by the collar of his shirt. "Now graft them in, or else the next thing he'll eat is sweet revenge." He threw the doctor on the ground and started walking out of the room. "Let your prodigy help you on this one. She may prove useful to you." He opened the door, and an eighteen year old girl walked in.

"Hey dad, what do we have today?" The girl asked, unfazed at the rooms contents.

"We have to surgically insert these two organs into this young ghoul's body." The doctor traced two areas under my shoulder blades with a surgical pen. "Here and here. Since they are classified as Koukaku." The girl started using a scalpel on the marked area on my left. I giggled at the tickling sensation of the blade sliding into my flesh and blood slowly creeping out of the wound.

"Like this?" She asked her father. "I think he likes this. Do ghouls take this much pleasure in pain dad?"

"Usually no. But I've been using this one for so long that he's probably developed a way for his body to cope with the pain." He started using a scalpel on the other marked area.

"It doesn't matter though right dad? Ghouls just care about eating and killing, so we have to teach them not to kill good people by showing them what will happen if they do."

"So you've been listening to me now? Yes, that's exactly it my young Clover." I could hear him whisper numbers under his breath, like he usually does when cutting me open. I close my eyes and go into my mind to talk with Hoji.

"That was quick." He taunted. "Getting soft again?"

"No." I replied calmly. "I just wanted to talk, since this operation seems like it's going to be boring anyway."

"What's your name?" He asked, out of the blue.

"What do you mean?"

"What is your name. I seem to have forgotten it after a while. I want to know if you have too." He looked at me expectantly.

"Hold on a minute." I thought about my name, hoping to find a memory of what I was called. Each memory I pulled up was blurred and garbled. The only one that I could hear was when I first arrived at the facility. "I look like the nine tailed fox."

"That doesn't answer my question stupid."

"I think it does. We learned about the nine tailed fox. It was a demon, or spirit, and in the end its name was Hoji." I explained.

"So what? My name is Hoji, but that doesn't mean you're the nine tailed fox."

"I think it does. You're the result of me being driven out of my comfortable world where I was safe and protected, and Hoji is what it called itself when it was asked to leave it's stone, where it was protected from anything."

"I guess you could say that. Well then, welcome back Fox, to your own tormented mind." Hoji smiled at me, as if I had finished a riddle that had been giving him trouble ever since he had existed in my mind.

I woke up after the surgery to the girl sewing my wounds. She was humming something, like a song that my mother used to sing with me.

"Children start out very little; Not so smart and bones so brittle; But it seem to take no time; To grow up strong sweet love of mine." I sang softly as she hummed. She bent down to my face and looked at me with curious puzzlement.

"How do you know that song?" She asked. I looked at her soft dark face, analyzing it for any form of empathy or remorse.

"My mother used to sing it to me." I replied with as much annoyance as I could muster. "I wonder how a human with no heart would know the same song."

"Don't call me heartless because of what happened to you. Ghouls have no feelings. They only eat and kill." She stood up and continued to sew my flesh together more rapidly.

"And where did you hear something like that, young human? Your devil of a father?"

"My father is working for the good of humans, to protect them from ghouls like you. And I'll have you know, I'm an adult!"

"Eighteen is barely an adult. You're not even making your own judgments yet. You still trust the word of your father blindly. A man who stole a ten year old boy from a haven and tore him open to see what made him tick!"

"My father would never steal a human boy from anywhere. He wouldn't cut open a child ever."

"That boy lost his life and family. He spent time trying to forget his parents' deaths and tried to build a new life here, with other children like him!" I started screaming at the top of my lungs. "He destroyed him. Slaughtered his way of life and experimented on him for six years!"

"Then tell me who this boy is and I'll ask my father if this is true, you stupid monster!"

"That boy is me! This monster that your father made!" I thrashed around while screaming this at the top of my lungs. Trying desperately to escape this torture, this nightmare that I had somehow existed in for so long. I heard the door slam and froze. "Hello?" I asked the dark expanse of the room. Once again, I was alone. Alone to cry so that no one would see the pain I held within me.


End file.
